Friday, May 4, 2018

Emeritus Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz is
quickly becoming one of the heroes of the current political moment. As his
friends on the left suspend their rational faculties in order to overturn
an election result that did not please them, Dershowitz has stood tall,
defending principle, fairly. He has called them out for hypocrisy and for abusing the authority of the state.

And as overzealous prosecutors persecute anyone associated
with Donald Trump or his campaign, Dershowitz is sounding a tocsin of alarm. He
knows that goes around comes around. The ferocious culture warriors who are
trying to destroy Trump and his associates will eventually see their zeal
boomerang against them.

His points are clear. Prosecutors are not treating Trump
fairly. They are not treating him as they would treat a Hillary Clinton. This
undermines the rule of law, decisively. Second, he is appalled at the way the
power of the state, especially the power to investigate and prosecute, has been
abused by the #GetTrump crowd.

Here, via the Daily Caller, is a transcript of his remarks
on MSNBC yesterday:

“I do
not trust the government. I do not trust judges. I do not trust prosecutors
when they are zealously seeking to go after a particular target, in this case
Donald Trump,” the lawyer stated on MSNBC. “Nobody would have been going after
Michael Cohen if he weren’t Donald Trump’s lawyer. That’s the reality.”

“People
don’t investigate campaign contribution lapses or campaign rule violations
generally about people who aren’t in the public life, and I just worry that
when you have somebody with a target on his or her back – whether it is Hillary
Clinton who could have been elected and had the same thing happen to her, or
Donald Trump that civil libertarians ought to express concern.”

“I
don’t want to live in the surveillance state,” he continued. “I want to do
everything in my power no matter who the target is to prevent this from
occurring.”

“… You
can go through the federal criminal code and find crimes that virtually any
businessman, any politician has committed,” Dershowitz stated. “It is so easy
to get a warrant. It is so easy to persuade a judge to give you a wiretap
warrant. That simply doesn’t protect American citizens, and any civil libertarian
who was exposed to what’s going on here today — if Hillary Clinton were the
subject — would be taking exactly the opposite position.”

“There
is so much hypocrisy, partisan hypocrisy out there. I don’t mind if
conservatives take the view we ought to trust government or former prosecutors
take the view we ought to trust government. My gripe is against civil
libertarians and criminal defense lawyers who are always on the side of
challenging the government, the ACLU, who have suddenly lost its way and
forgotten what they’ve preached for 50 years because it is Donald Trump they’re
after.”

It would be more real to me if it was just the Democrats cheering for Republican Mueller's success to help install Republican Mike Pence as president. But real partisan justice or the appearance of partisan justice is extremely dangerous, and the complexity of criminal law means we're all vulnerable of innocently breaking some serious law. Like this claim from 2009...http://reason.com/archives/2009/10/19/were-all-felons-now In his new book, the Boston-based civil liberties advocate Harvey Silverglate estimates that in 2009, the average American commits about three federal felonies per day.

OTOH, some crimes are hard to catch and tax evasion is what finally got Al Capone. So even if you get caught on the technicalities, it doesn't make you innocent. And if the tables turn on the Democrats next time, in the end, won't they appreciate the house cleaning too?